NY Review of Books, May 10, 2021
The Paranoid Style in Adam Curtis
Sasha Frere-Jones
His films choreograph archive footage, charismatic pop, and portentous
commentary in pursuit of a dark, totalizing narrative—all the seduction
of conspiracy theory without the substance.
May 8, 2021
Filmmaker and journalist Adam Curtis has been working at the BBC since
1980, institutionally blessed for over forty years. He’s made more than
twenty films and television series that exploit his unfettered access to
the BBC archives. In them, he stitches together previously shot footage
to explore, in an open-ended and seductive style, historical figures and
ideas: terrorism, various demented elites, Putin.
His first major series, Pandora’s Box, won him the BAFTA for Best
Factual Series in 1993. This program was about the ways in which science
is misused in the name of social progress, beginning with a review of
industrial production in the Bolshevik era. His 2002 series, The Century
of the Self, examined the connections between Freud, public relations,
and political polling. His most recent film, the six-part, eight-hour
Can’t Get You Out of My Head, subtitled An Emotional History of the
Modern World, was released on the BBC iPlayer in February (viewers
outside the UK can currently find it on the site thoughtmaybe.com, which
describes itself as an online not-for-profit library).
We are living through strange days. These films are a history of how we
got to this place and why both those in power and we find it so
difficult to move on. They will trace different forces across the world
that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as
well, and they are told in a different way. They are an emotional
history of what went on inside the heads of all kinds of people, because
in the age of the individual, what you felt and what you wanted and what
you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world,
and to understand the present, you have to go back and see what happened
when those hopes and dreams and uncertainties inside people’s minds met
the much older forces of power, often power that was decaying and
desperate to keep its ascendancy. These strange days did not just
happen, we and those in power created them together.
This latest series, like most of the others before it, examines the
failure of states and big tent philosophies, and the sad state of the
unattached individual who, with nothing but the roomy shawl of
individualism as cover, must also fail.
In January, Sam Knight of The New Yorker hailed Curtis’s work as
“hallucinatory, daring attempts to explain modern mass predicaments.”
Danny Leigh wrote in the Financial Times that his films are “about all
of it, all the time; history told not through textbook landmarks but
odd, novelistic lives and moments until bang: the lightning flash.” More
recently, Miles Ellingham told Jacobin readers that the new Curtis
series was “a genuine epic,” and credited its auteur with “revolutionary
Marxist critiques of capitalist instability.” Aside from a small stream
of skeptical reactions, the mainstream press treats Curtis as a
cutting-edge filmmaker and public intellectual. He has a following that
accepts him as such; there is a steady stream of commenters on Reddit
and YouTube attesting to how Curtis is blowing their minds.
If you are satisfied by having a bunch of historical nuggets loaded into
a cage and shaken about to no particular end, you might agree. I, sadly,
have less than no idea how Curtis meant to connect Jiang Qing, Tupac
Shakur, Michael de Freitas, Joan Baez, Arthur Sackler, Sandra Paul,
Bernard Kouchner, Julia Grant, the Baader-Meinhof group, and a dozen
others, at a narrative or conceptual level. Yet here they all are.
Although Curtis and I both like popular music and empty hallways, my
relationship to his work can fairly be described as an aversion. (I had
a brief e-mail exchange with him in 2013, and he was both professional
and polite. I have no aversion to Curtis the person.) Other nonbelievers
have described his work as “incoherent” and “neoconservative,” which are
words I would not use. The politics of Curtis’s films do not bother me
because his work does not display the consistent, perceptible act of
choice that constitutes political engagement. If his movies were
presented as some kind of fever dream collage, I might like them. Curtis
vexes me because of his paranoid writing, a method that introduces a
soft and acidic coagulant into any discussion. His commentaries destroy
the cellular structure of ideas with a terminal vagueness that lulls me
into a fitful sleep.
One wonders how Curtis imagines he can deliver an “emotional history of
what went on inside the heads of all kinds of people” when the people in
question are all dead. Mind-reading, or the assigning of intentionality,
is a cardinal sin in journalism—and Curtis has always told anybody who
asks him that he is a journalist. This is not a minor assertion, as it
seems that his movies are taken seriously for this reason precisely,
because they assert the facticity of journalism.
Curtis lays his archival bits end-to-end: concatenation. But placing
things in a row produces a montage, something that is neither an
“essay,” a thing he has claimed to be presenting, nor an analysis. For
example, one prominent member of his cast this time is Michael de
Freitas. When we meet him, De Freitas is a low-level enforcer for a
London slumlord named Peter Rachman, a figure who became “hated with an
overwhelming disgust as the face of evil.” De Freitas goes on to be a
figure in the British Black Power movement—calling himself Michael
X—before fleeing England and arranging to have someone stabbed to death.
What De Freitas represents is never clear, but it hardly matters. The
sordid trumps the logical here.
How sordid? Curtis mentions two suicides during the course of Can’t Get
You Out of My Head: Edgar Mittelholzer and Robin Douglas-Home.
Mittelholzer, a disaffected anticolonial novelist, covered himself in
paraffin and set it alight. Douglas-Home, an aristocrat who dabbled in
jazz and suffered from depression, committed suicide a few years after a
highly publicized divorce from his wife, Sandra Paul. How does Curtis
describe this?
For men like Robin Douglas-Home, the expectation of power had been
deeply embedded inside their minds, but as the world had changed around
them and real power ebbed away, they were left with a terrible
melancholy, that in some would turn to despair.
How does Curtis know what was embedded in Douglas-Home’s mind? And
unless Douglas-Home left a very specific note, how would Curtis know
whether or not his feelings about power affected the decision to take
his own life?
Curtis reduces the viewer to a kind of flustered traffic cop, constantly
yelling, “Wait!” His narration constantly leaps from a minor detail to a
wide claim that sweeps everything off the table. The effect is a bit
like being buttonholed by a child who begs to skip homework by
presenting an impromptu lecture.
During a segment in episode four about Deng Xiaoping and the trial of
the Gang of Four, Curtis quotes Jiang Qing as yelling, “I am without
heaven and a law unto myself! It is right to rebel!” as she is being
removed from a courtroom. This checks out, and it’s been reported
elsewhere. But then, Curtis pole vaults into his own realm, where he
sees a big picture all his own: “And then, that force that Jiang Qing
had prophesied—individualism—reemerged.” She does not, in this series,
prophesy any such thing.
Maybe this is a reference to the Democracy Wall, which had then just
been introduced, though individualism seems an odd way to characterize
collective resistance to Deng Xiaoping’s repression. Or maybe Curtis is
tying individualism to another quote, when Jiang Qing called herself a
“unit of one.” But this is a strange brief for Jiang Qing as the avatar
of individualism, as she spent much of her life as a member of the
Chinese state, a figure of institutional power. Her struggles read most
easily as a traditional jockeying between political factions, with
perhaps more power than usual involved.
I asked Tiffany Sia for her take on this part of the narrative. Sia is
an artist and the author of Too Salty Too Wet, her 2021 book about
unrest, migration, and Hong Kong. She pointed out to me: “The Curtis
take on Jiang Qing is especially odd, considering that, after Mao died,
she famously said, ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whoever Chairman Mao asked
me to bite, I bit.’ What does that say about individualism? Nothing.”
In episode three, “Money Changes Everything,” Curtis narrates the
introduction of Valium and how Arthur Sackler helped market it. “Valium
had touched on something inside human beings, but nobody knew what it was.”
Valium does indeed go inside the human being. But as Andrea Tone’s
history of benzodiazepines, The Age of Anxiety (2008), tells us, the
people who made the drug were very much aware of what Valium touched,
how it did that, and why. Valium wasn’t even the first commercially
marketed tranquilizer—that was Miltown, introduced in the 1950s with
some fairly hilarious magazine ads. It plays pretty well, visually, if
someone wants to make a film about benzodiazepines.
In episode four, Curtis moves from Valium to Oxycontin, with one of
those spoonfuls of plummy speaking that makes nonsense sound like news:
It was a synthetic form of opium and it was sold as a painkiller. But
then, workers who were being laid off as the factories closed found that
they got more benefits if they were disabled, so they went to their
doctors and said they were injured, and the doctors gave them Oxycontin.
They got their benefit, but they also discovered that Oxycontin made
them feel safe, in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears of
the new postindustrial world.
This is a cinnamon roll of awfulness, spirals of doughy suggestion
interleaved with spicy mendacity. Imagine being injured in an accident
and getting hooked on Oxycontin, which is one of the most common ways
people get addicted to this form of opioid. There you are, fighting
through recovery, listening to this stranger tell you that you are
taking Oxy to protect yourself from fears of “the new postindustrial
world”—oh, and also, you’re a scammer.
That this series was being edited well into 2021 should be taken into
account when reviewing the fact that what Curtis chooses to drive home
in his Oxycontin segment is the unsupported assertion that opioids
became a crisis because workers started lying about their injuries.
In episode six, Curtis says that “millions had become addicted to
opioids and yet no one in power had come to rescue them.” I’m not in the
habit of praising state and federal prosecutors, but they did something
this time. Purdue Pharma, the company owned by the Sacklers, has been
fined billions of dollars for illegal and aggressive marketing tactics
that helped create the opioid crisis. The behavior of the Sacklers was
brought into the light by journalists like Patrick Radden Keefe and
Christopher Glazek, and by the direct action of people like Nan Goldin
and everyone who protested at museums supported by the Sacklers. Curtis
introduces the Sacklers but does not mention either their criminal
actions or their company’s publicly admitted guilt.
Occasionally, other people’s efforts appear inside his own, uncredited.
In the second episode, “Shooting and Fucking Are the Same Thing,” Curtis
faithfully recreates a sequence from Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof
Komplex, a 2008 feature film about a West German radical leftist group
known as the Red Army Faction. Curtis borrows Edel’s staging of the
RAF’s time in Jordan, where its members learned how to fight with
automatic weapons and disagreed with their Jordanian instructors about
public nudity. Curtis cuts his version with archival footage instead of
actors, but still borrows a key phrase from Edel’s scene to title the
episode.
There’s a good sequence on the Ku Klux Klan in episode five, an accurate
and swift summation of how the racist murder club invented a history and
borrowed its symbols. Hardly new stuff, but well-executed. But why is it
here? How does it relate to the other eight hours of this series? Curtis
drags even solid research into a paranoid generalism that obviates the
patience and focus necessary for a critical sequence of connected
thoughts. Curtis is constantly opening his bag so wide that everything
just falls out. Théorie Communiste’s recent essay on conspiracism help
us frame what Curtis is doing. “Just as anti-Semitism was the socialism
of fools,” the collective’s authors write, “conspiracism is the class
struggle of experts who are not situated anywhere in particular, not in
society, nor along a politico-ideological spectrum.”
*
If we turn to how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the scholar of queer theory,
described paranoid reading in 2002, we can better understand what Curtis
is doing. Sedgwick spoke about the advantages of the paranoid position,
which she also called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” “Paranoia knows
some things well and others poorly,” she wrote. In that spirit, I would
say that Curtis asks us to consider worthy topics. As a business-class
concierge for history’s biggest bummers, he does the work. It is when
Curtis starts writing the commentary for his montages that my fur goes
up. Any hopes that the paranoid position might be taking us to a
productive place dissolve, as assertions (never arguments) stack up
alongside his boy’s salad of titillation.
For example, in episode three, Curtis plays the audio of astronaut
Vladimir Komarov’s last words as he died in a malfunctioning space
capsule, or as Curtis so soberly presents it, “Komarov’s final cries of
rage, as he plunged to his death on the plains of Kazakhstan.” We also
get to see his charred remains, of course, because they show us all how
“the Communist dream had become corrupt.” At times, it seems that
Curtis’s biggest coup has been selling red-meat tabloid prurience as
highbrow political thinky think.
Flat-fee conspiracists like Curtis are obsessed with elites and
politicians and “the system,” like kids under the covers overhearing
grown folks talking, reducing complex relations to Star Wars set pieces.
Obediently, in a Curtis film, every group and individual that might seem
to offer agency or resistance fails, yielding the true goal of the
paranoid: always already defeated. Because Curtis is unable to reconcile
his positions and move toward a more coherent reading of history, we are
forever stuck in the early developmental stage of the paranoid, sensing
menacing and incomplete parts, terrified of change.
“Because there must be no bad surprises,” Sedgwick writes, “and because
learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a
bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.”
In Curtis films, the bad news seems to be the only real news and it is
always uncovered in roughly the same way. The banks take over, a
high-minded experiment fails, the sexy Soviets come marching in, and an
unidentified Black American nods off, too high to act.
“There’s this kind of left figure, but sometimes not really on the left,
who tends to think of power entirely in terms of organizations and
figures at the top and elites,” UC Berkeley lecturer Jasper Bernes wrote
to me. “I think of Julian Assange as a kind of figure like that, or
maybe Glenn Greenwald. There’s a left media sphere which really doesn’t
see anything happening except these powerful people making decisions and
producing discourse, which is really not the way societies and economies
work.”
Curtis films purport to be about us. But the paranoid writing dominates,
and the viewer is left with unknown anxieties projected onto known
images, a sort of emotional break-in. Curtis can’t seem to get Curtis
out of his head, and I am not sure that his films tell us about anything
else. In his 2010 film, Richard Nixon—Paranoia and Moral Panics, Curtis
declared his emotional history a universal one:
This is a film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon. Just like
him, we have all become paranoid weirdos. It’s the story of how
television and newspapers did this and how it has paralyzed the ability
of politics to transform the world for the better.… But then, in the
1990s, the journalists became even more like Richard Nixon. Like him,
they started to see hidden enemies everywhere.
We know that Curtis always asserts he is a journalist. But as the
narrator of his own films, he feels compelled to dismiss journalists.
This is pure paranoid fragmentation: a paranoid individual like all
other paranoid individuals but insisting on being unlike all others. He
is everywhere and nowhere.
For Curtis, all human behavior becomes a monochromatic cloud of
intention that can be tracked like a flight. Distinct forces play
against distinct forces without the complications of chance or the
constraint of specific details. One scientific blunder becomes the
failure of science itself. One overeager journalist becomes the field
itself. Eras and cohorts and ideas are smooth circles, rounded off by
the totalizing buff of power’s sneaky omnipotence.
Notice, in fact, how many times Curtis uses the words “nothing” and
“everything” in all of his work. Very little reporting can stand up to
those kindergarten words, and by choosing a category that essentially
doesn’t exist—can you name an actual everything, an event that does not
admit to exception?—Curtis is making clear that reporting means little
to him.
The appeal of conspiracizing for Curtis and his followers is exactly
this unverifiable fog, this woolen hug of futility. If nothing can be
done, inactivity looks normative. Conspiracism is the enemy of
collective action. The group takes action and counts its wins and losses
after the day. The conspiracist, answers scrawled on his hand, hangs
back and cynically tells a story about why it never would have worked
anyway. Curtis and his cohort love the idea of a grand story that never
needs to be revised or reported out.
The darkest and largest force always wins, has always already won.
Curtis simply confirms the bad news.
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